29 May 2012 9:27 PM

The judgment of Leveson

Thank goodness for Michael Gove. In a bravura performance at the Leveson inquiry into press ethics, he got it absolutely right. Journalists and politicians had always been held in low regard, he said briskly; journalism was a rough old trade which hadn’t always attracted respectable characters. It was ever thus, and if journalism was to be regulated liberty would basically go down the tubes.

Yes, bad things had been done at News International, but there was ample scope to punish such misdeeds under the law, the proper avenue for redress. The inquiry had already had a chilling effect on the press, he had said earlier this year; the danger was that although there was indeed a problem with press ethics, the possible remedy to be suggested by this inquiry was likely to prove more lethal than the disease.

Hallelujah.

Lord Justice Leveson did not appear to find Mr Gove’s contribution helpful. Indeed, the judge’s tone towards him ranged from the querulous to the incredulous. Hardly surprising: the judge has been imploring witnesses, such as Tony Blair yesterday, to help him arrive at a solution to the problem of press excesses which will simultaneously satisfy aggrieved press targets and the press itself. Yet here was the Education Secretary breezing in and crisply telling himthat it couldn’t be done without harming press freedom, and in effect that the whole basis for the inquiry was fundamentally flawed.

No wonder Leveson LJ was irritated. I have some sympathy for his predicament. He is a decent, thoughtful man who is acutely aware of the dangers to press freedom from outside regulation. He has no wish whatever to go down in history as the person who killed the British press, nor to produce a report which will be quietly binned. At the same time, however, he is also aware that a lot of people are jumping up and down over press intrusions into their privacy, harassment and other similar horrors and want something to be done to stop it. And indeed, he seemed personally affronted by Gove’s apparent insouciance towards their rage and distress.

Well, I’m with Gove. This will strike many people – perhaps including Lord Justice Leveson – as preposterous, but I believe that ultimately, provided what journalists are doing is not against the law people should just put up with it. Do some journalists behave appallingly? Yes. Do they sometimes bully, snoop and intrude? Yes. Would I hate it if it was done to me? Yes (it has, actually). Do I think that therefore the press should be regulated to stop such behaviour? No, no, no. The press would then be unable to do their job of finding things out in the public interest.

Ho ho, you scoff, public interest, very droll; pruriently interested public, more like. And yes, that’s often true. But it is simply impossible to regulate to protect the innocent without also protecting the guilty from exposure.

People find it unacceptable that the press should be the one body of people who are somehow immune from outside regulation. Actually, even that’s not true: one of the defining aspects of a profession used to be self-regulation, the guarantee of its all-important independence (a principle no less valuable for having taken a dive in recent years as the state has got more and more involved).

Anyway, the point about a free press is that, as we all know, it is the guardian of democracy. And if you look at different democracies, the press tends to reflect the particular character of each society.

Thus the French press is so bound by respect for hierarchies, not to mention protecting the sacred right of every French citizen to have a bit on the side, that it wouldn’t dream of revealing the peccadilloes of its politicians, thus leaving the citizenry in the dark about their misdeeds.

The American press, so loud and absolute in its attachment to freedom of speech, is nevertheless in practice supinely respectful towards those in power, in accordance with the deep conformism of American society (the characteristic that de Tocqueville noted centuries ago).

By contrast, the British press has always been disrespectful, rude, vulgar, scurrilous and generally outrageous, and has been scandalising the British public at least since the pamphleteers of the 18th century. That is in accordance with the British character, which has always been coarse, bawdy, bloody-minded and healthily contemptuous of authority.

And that in turn is why the British concept of liberty has been the freest in the world. Fetter the press and you therefore destroy the particular character of British liberty. Yes, you can have a press that is tidily regulated so that it no longer camps at the bottom of someone’s drive to snatch a picture; but then it won’t be Britain any more. It will be France.

Lord Justice Leveson thinks you can have both outside regulation and a free press. You can’t. It’s one or the other. He has said he is thinking of a system of press regulation not under the control of the state, parliament, government or the press. Well who’s left? The judiciary? But whoever appoints the regulator will in effect control the press.

Lord Justice Leveson has been asked to square a circle; but as we all know, circles cannot be squared. To which he might reasonably throw up his hands in exasperation and ask how on earth therefore he is to arrive at a solution to this problem. To which the disobliging answer is – we wouldn’t have started from here.

The Prime Minister reacted to public outrage over a story about deleted messages on the hacked mobile phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler – a story subsequently shown to be false -- by setting up a wholly uncalled for inquiry into press ethics in general. As a result, the press has been effectively put on trial, and Lord Justice Leveson has been tasked with arriving at a judgment at which King Solomon might have blanched.

But just as the baby in the famous Solomonic dispute could not have been divided in two, so the press cannot be both regulated and free. The judge will unfortunately have to decide which side he is on.

Share this article:

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

I must admit that I do not want to see press freedoms curtailed. BUT and its a deliberately big but...........

Neither do I want to see the press in cahoots with politicians which they evidently have been for too long now. with freedom comes responsibility and the responsibility to report clearly and accurately what is the news of the day. Publishing political 'crib sheets' in support of the politicians of the day in order to partake in their propaganda exercises was the starting point of the press becoming corrupted. The death of honest investigative journalism in favour of becoming lobby fodder has allowed the politicians into a position whereby they can now insist on compliance or expect to have their positions controlled by those to whom they sold out their souls years ago.
The only control over the press should be its absolute rejection of bedding in with any politician against the interests of the people on whose behalf they SHOULD be defending our democratic nation. They have failed, their credibility is detroyed and whatever is done to restrict them, they have brought upon themselves.
Personally the Blogosphere has more real news than the MSM every day.....and is not subject to the 'proprietor skewed brain bypass' which the now failing MSM has found acceptable for far too long.
the time has come - not to restrict the press - but the ownership of the press. In that no single organisation or person should have control over more than say a 20% share holding in any media company operating in the UK. ownership needs to be about 'investment' and not about 'infuence'.

We are continuously told by our political elite and that thereof that Britain has freedom of speech and is quote "...a great example of a society does". The Levinson enquiry is reaching it's verdict; but I state that in today's left-wing capitalist state we find ourselves in within England > Britain and specifically English > British people DON'T have the freedom of speech that our forefathers who fought in 2 world wars for and to protect, i.e. to be able to say and think what we wanted in our own country. They were NOT fighting for tolerance and equality!

Our society will imprison it's own nationals for suspected "thought crimes" and specifically anything that offends 'minorities' (even though they appear to not be a 'minority' in vast amount of areas in the UK and indeed in some cities already outnumber the 'majority') we've seen evidence of this during high profile examples such as various quote-on-quote "racism" cases historically, and recently Liam Stacey twitter outburst jail, Diane Abbot MP twitter outburst - one-rule-for-one, and one for another it would seem. Double standards justice is what occurs in this country, NOT freedom of speech but disguised as such.

We live in a world where you can be dragged all over Europe for having counter proposition views on certain events, There was a report produced some years ago concerning the the war in Iraq, the report suggested that upwards of 200-250 thousand Iraqi's have perished during that conflict but Blair & Bush say that it's a LIE! They refute those figures, they question the methodology on which the figures are based, the real figure is less than that but why do they do that? They do that because the figures and evidence are of CRUCIAL political importance.

The result of the leveson inquiry will be interesting, even though if many papers printed articles that they did 50-70 years ago today, they would be considered illegal in the ultra-sensitive, dispensation of thought that exists here - despite the fact that a large number of our people do not agree with that dispensation of thought that exits here - and have ventilated it in previous elections such as the election of The BNP's 2 MEP's to the European Parliament.

The longer this farce of an enquiry goes on, the more i'm beginning to think it was a deliberate set up to gag the press and destroy certain people...if so who is behind it, or am i completey way off base here?

No way do i want the press gagged, it would be a disaster and a sad day for Britain.

I agree (for once) with MP over resisting the regulation of the press and that in the US the non-regulated press as very conformist (although probably not to the same effect as she might say: it slavishly supports Israel 99% of the time) but disagree that over here the press is "disrespectful, rude, vulgar, scurrilous and generally outrageous, and has been scandalising the British public at least since the pamphleteers of the 18th century" if that is meant to imply that the press is questioning of the use of power by the government - it's actually broadly as conformist as the US media.

Where it is "disrespectful, rude, vulgar, scurrilous" etc. is when it selects a celebrity or anyone it doesn't like and vilifies them mercilessly.

The mainstream press in this country does take an antagonistic stance toward the government of the day on the basis of their politics, as they are perfectly entitled to do. I have no problem with the Daily Mail being a right-wing paper supporting the Conservative Party and the Mirror supporting the Labour Party (I'm told they do but I don't read the latter). Let them go ahead and do so but it does mean that the spectrum of debate is actually very narrow. Sample the non-mainstream press in this country and the US (and I don't mean the Spectator or the New Statesman, both mainstream) and you'll see how narrow the terms of debate are.

The way to raise press standards and broaden the debate is not through government regulation.

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the moderator has approved them. They must not exceed 500 words. Web links cannot be accepted, and may mean your whole comment is not published.